PERFORMING ARTS : First-Class Hollywood Composers : Six makers of film music will at last get their own stamps this week.

Six of the movies’ greatest composers--men whose music was far better known than their names--are about to receive an unprecedented degree of nationwide face time: Their images on postage stamps.

Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann and Dimitri Tiomkin are featured in the Hollywood Composers series of 33-cent stamps to be unveiled in ceremonies at 10 a.m. Thursday at the Hollywood Bowl.

Film historian Leonard Maltin will host the event, which will feature American Film Institute director Jean Picker Firstenberg as speaker and John Mauceri conducting the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in an “open rehearsal” of music by the six Oscar-winning composers, who are best known for their work during Hollywood’s golden age. The mini-concert will include music from such classics as “Gone With the Wind,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “Vertigo.” More than 1,500 youngsters from Los Angeles-area schools are expected to attend, and the event is free and open to the public.

For film music champions like Mauceri, who often programs movie scores at the Bowl, the recognition is long overdue.

“After many years of neglect, and sometimes worse than neglect, the composers of film music are being treated as American heroes, along with athletes, presidents and political figures of all kinds,” he said. “It means that they are being recognized along with other people of achievement in the United States.”

David Newman, son of Alfred Newman and a Hollywood composer himself, said he felt that “the whole industry is being honored” with this event.

According to Azeezaly Jaffer, executive director of stamp services for the U.S. Postal Service, the six Hollywood Composers stamps, along with six Broadway Songwriters stamps to be released next week, are the last in the Legends of American Music series launched in 1993 with the best-selling Elvis Presley stamp.

Jaffer said that the selection and design process dates back to 1991 with the initial recommendations of the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee, which were screened by musicologists at the Smithsonian Institution and other experts.

“They’ve been talking about it for several years,” said Olivia Tiomkin Douglas, Tiomkin’s widow, by phone from her home near London. “We thought it was something that probably would never come off. It’s almost unbelievable.”

John W. Waxman, Franz Waxman’s son, thinks his father would be “really thrilled that his adopted country has embraced him in this way. Here is a man who came from a country where the only people who ever appeared on stamps were dictators or dogs.”

In fact, four of the six composers were European emigres. Steiner and Korngold were Austrian, Waxman was German, Tiomkin a Russian. Herrmann was a New Yorker and Newman was born in New Haven, Conn. All six arrived in Hollywood within a 10-year period (1929-39) and, while three of them also enjoyed careers in concert music, all owed their lasting fame to the movies.

Steiner and Newman came to Hollywood after enormous success as Broadway conductors in the ‘20s. The prolific Steiner (1888-1971) counted among his works for 300 films such seminal scores as “King Kong” and “Gone With the Wind.” He spent nearly 30 years at Warner Bros., where he cleverly interpolated the song “As Time Goes By” throughout “Casablanca,” accompanied Bette Davis’ romantic adventures in “Now, Voyager” and rode the pop charts to success (at the age of 71) with the theme for “A Summer Place.”

Newman (1900-1970) was the most honored composer in Hollywood history, winning nine Oscars out of 45 nominations. Musical director of 20th Century Fox throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s, he was widely considered the finest conductor in movies and composed such memorable scores as “Wuthering Heights,” “All About Eve” and “How the West Was Won.” He seemed especially inspired by religious subjects, notably “The Song of Bernadette,” “The Robe” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” Newman was the patriarch of a composing dynasty that includes brothers Lionel and Emil, sons David and Thomas, daughter Maria and nephew Randy.

Korngold (1897-1957) was already a renowned composer in his native Vienna before making Hollywood his home in the late ‘30s. He considered film music “operas without singing” and wrote wildly romantic scores for such Errol Flynn swashbucklers as “Captain Blood,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” and “The Sea Hawk.” The current revival of interest in his concert music (including such operas as “Die tote Stadt”) came about after a series of ‘70s albums of his film music.

Waxman (1906-1967) worked in the German film industry alongside such up-and-comers as Billy Wilder. Chased out of Berlin by Hitler’s minions in 1934, he ended up in Hollywood, where he scored Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” and “Rear Window,” Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” and “The Spirit of St. Louis” as well as “A Place in the Sun” and “Peyton Place.” He founded the Los Angeles Music Festival in 1947 and was its principal conductor, introducing to the West Coast works by Stravinsky, Britten and Shostakovich.

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Herrmann (1911-1975), considered one of the most original voices in American film music, didn’t hesitate to use nine harps (on “Beneath the 12-Mile Reef”), two theremins (“The Day the Earth Stood Still”) or the medieval woodwind known as the serpent (“Journey to the Center of the Earth”). His very first score was for Orson Welles’ landmark “Citizen Kane,” and he spent an extraordinary decade working for Hitchcock on such films as “Psycho,” “Vertigo” and “North by Northwest.”

Tiomkin (1894-1979) was probably the greatest showman among the Hollywood composers, frequently quoted in the press and among the earliest to campaign for Academy Awards. A shrewd businessman, he was among the first to seek publishing rights to his own music (an unusual move, since studios insist on owning the music in their films). For Frank Capra, he scored “Lost Horizon,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life”; he later became a western specialist with scores like “High Noon,” “Duel in the Sun” and “The Alamo.”

The stamp portraits for all six composers were based on photographs and painted by Pasadena-based artist Drew Struzan, whose many movie projects have included posters for the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” films. The photos weren’t copied with absolute fidelity, however: a cigarette dangling from Herrmann’s mouth in the original picture has been excised for the stamp. (“We’re a government agency,” explained Jaffer. “This is one of those delicate issues. . . .”)

John Waxman was particularly proud that a photograph he took of his father in 1960 was chosen as the basis for the Waxman stamp. He served as the Postal Service’s liaison with members of all six families, because his company, Connecticut-based Themes & Variations, is in the business of renting the music written by these and other film composers to orchestras for live performance or recording projects.

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The post office always has some sort of celebration to kick off the release of important stamp issues, but Jaffer acknowledged that Thursday’s first-day-of-issue ceremonies are unusual. “We wanted to do something that would rekindle moments of our past, spark imagination and interest in the leaders and conductors of tomorrow, and have a little fun with it. It is unique to do it in the Hollywood Bowl, but what better place to commemorate the brilliance of these artists?”

Dorothy Herrmann, Bernard Herrmann’s daughter, said she thinks her father “would have been enormously pleased. For his entire life, he really wanted people to accept music in film as a very important art form.”

Mauceri said he was characterizing the mini-concert as an “open rehearsal” because the orchestra has no formal performance of the music scheduled. Thursday’s program will essentially be a run-through, with stops and starts. “I’ll be talking to the kids about each piece, giving them an inkling of the process [behind] this kind of music. It’s a part of the cultural history of every kid who’s grown up in Los Angeles.” *

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HOLLYWOOD COMPOSERS STAMP UNVEILING Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. Date: Thursday, 10 a.m. Price: Free. Phone: (323) 850-2000.